As Nadiya Hussain presented Britain’s Queen Elizabeth with her 90th birthday cake, lovingly made in her kitchen at home, there was a defining moment that signified how far she had come.
“I am trying to talk, muffling all my words, and then Prince Philip comes up and the Queen introduces me to him,” she told the chat show host Graham Norton. “You know you have made it when the Queen introduces you to someone else.
“My dad now introduces me as ‘the daughter who made the cake for the Queen’. I don’t even have a name anymore.”
Earlier this week, Hussain was announced as a nominee for the breakthrough star of the year in the Royal Television Society Awards in the United Kingdom. That followed hot on the heels of 32-year-old Hussain being unveiled as a face of the BBC's new cookery show, The Big Family Cooking Showdown, alongside co-presenter Zoe Ball.
Since the mother-of-three won The Great British Bake Off reality show in 2015, Hussain has become a household name in her native UK as a TV presenter, cookbook author, columnist and writer, also winning fans worldwide.
A deal signed with the BBC in October ensured she will be the frontwoman for several shows – and in the process, normalised the idea of a Muslim woman in a hijab presenting programmes on national television, a rarity in Britain.
The BBC, it seems, can't get enough of her. "Nadiya is an exciting new talent and it has been great watching her thrive creatively since she won ...Bake Off," director of content, Charlotte Moore, said. "She has a refreshingly authentic voice, great warmth and charisma and a natural ability to connect with audiences."
Hussain's response has always been typically self-deprecating. "I wasn't thinking about representing Muslims," she told The Guardian newspaper. "I was thinking about my bakes."
Born Nadiya Jamir Begum on Christmas Day in 1984, she grew up in a terraced home in Luton, north of London, a town with a large Muslim and South Asian community. Her Bangladeshi parents, who moved to England in the 1970s, brought many of their traditions with them.
Her father, Jamir Ali, worked as a waiter in an Indian restaurant and taught her to butcher a whole sheep: “I can do it in an hour-and-a-half flat,” she claims.
Hussain told The Guardian that they didn't have a dining table. Instead, she and her five siblings would squat on a bedsheet spread on the floor for meals, which invariably featured rice and "seven or eight curries, Bangladeshi style".
Desserts were never a part of the culture, she said, and she grew up with her two brothers and three sisters thinking the oven was no more than a cupboard.
“Mum would keep her frying pans in there and anything else that would fit,” she said. “I had no idea where cakes came from until I was a teenager,” she recalled. “The first time I saw a cake being made was my home economics class in the first year of high school. When I saw the teacher putting this mixture in the cupboard, I thought she’d lost it. Then out comes this cake. I thought she was a sorceress.”
It was her home-economics teacher, Jean Marshall, at Challney High School in Luton, who first inspired her to bake at the age of 12, and fostered her love of classic British puddings.
“I had to make puff pastry in my first class. I remember Mrs Marshall saying I was really good,” Hussain recalled.
But for a long time, home baking was as far as her passion went. Hussain had an arranged marriage at the age of 20 to an IT technician, Abdal, a man she had never previously met.
"I spoke to my husband for about six months, but never met him," she told daytime TV show Loose Women. "The first day we met was the day we got engaged and the second day we met was when we got married."
Her husband loved cakes, so she began baking for him every day. Abdal applied to The Great British Bake Off on her behalf.
"I very nearly didn't do it," she told Loose Women. "When I got that call, I picked up the phone three times to say: 'I don't want to do it'."
Hussain later revealed she was battling an anxiety disorder after being bullied as a teenager, and suffered frequent panic attacks. She got through the 10-week baking contest, she said, by wearing an elastic band on her wrist and plucking it as a kind of “shock therapy”.
“In week five or six, I pinged it so much I broke it. I have not worn it since,” she said.
Her honesty has endeared her to audiences, who have warmed to her humility and wit (on fluffing a souffle in a baking challenge, she declared: “I’d sooner have another baby. I really would.”)
Her status as the first Muslim winner of a show that pits amateur bakers against one another evolved into a debate about much more than iced buns.
Amanda Platell sneered in The Daily Mail that her "poor middle-class" rival Flora Shedden was maligned because of political correctness: "Perhaps if she'd made a chocolate mosque, she'd have stood a better chance". Ally Ross in The Sun said including contestants from different backgrounds was "ideological warfare".
Hussain refused to rise to the bait or respond to abuse on social media. She told presenter Kirsty Young on the radio programme Desert Island Discs last year: "I feel there's a dignity in silence. If I retaliate to negativity with negativity, then we've evened out. I need to be the better person."
Ultimately, she emerged triumphant in a final watched by more than 14 million people – including then prime minister David Cameron – making it the most-watched British programme of 2015. Fittingly, it was a dazzling creation called My Big Fat British Wedding Cake, a three-tiered lemon-drizzle affair decorated with sari fabric in Union Jack colours and her own wedding jewellery – the wedding cake she never got – that left the judges in tears.
Even the right-wing press were won over. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown described her in The Daily Mail as an "accidental heroine", writing: "Nadiya has done more to further the cause of Asian women and men than countless government policies, think tanks, initiatives and councils put together have achieved in the past half-century."
Hussain followed her win with the publication of her cookbook Nadiya's Kitchen and a children's recipe collection called Nadiya's Bake Me a Story, featuring her children Musa, 10, Dawud, 9, and Maryam, 6.
She has also co-written a novel called The Secret Lives of the Amir Sisters with author Ayisha Malik, about four Muslim sisters growing up in an English village.
And after a two-part documentary for the BBC last year called The Chronicles of Nadiya, in which she explored the food and heritage of her parents' homeland, there are more shows to follow, including The Big Family Cooking Showdown and Nadiya's British Food Adventure.
As for her personal plans, she wants to marry her husband again in a real-life big fat British wedding: “I’d love to do a proper British wedding,” she said. “This time, I’ll mean it.”
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